Friday, July 12, 2013

Oddly, Derek Smart was not involved.

Was Outpost just too fast-paced and plot driven of a video game for you? Emperor of the Fading Suns not rambling and pointless enough?

Try Penn and Teller's tour de force of digital ennui, Desert Bus!

(Of course, they did have the advantage of actually setting out to make the most pointlessly dull video game ever, an excuse not shared by Sierra On-Line...)


(h/t to Claire Wolfe.)

13 comments:

Weer'd Beard said...

Desert Bus was actually a libertarian protest to Janet Reno's complaint that video games were too violent and too graphic.

So they made one that was neither and of course it in intentionally one of the worst games ever made!

I've had more fun playing ET for the Atari 2600 than this game!

Woodman said...

Every year there is a Desert Bus for Charity for Child's Play, my favorite charity. Started by the guys at Penny Arcade to shut Jack Thompson up.

I've watched entirely too much video of people playing the game.

Robert said...

At least Sierra gave me my money back for Outpost. No joke. I sent the disks and a letter to them, and a few weeks later I got a check (that didn't bounce).

Tam said...

I upgraded to Windows on my shiny new 486 and bought my first CD-ROM drive specifically so I could play Outpost.

I was not amused. :D

aczarnowski said...

Penn and Teller do (did) it again. Nice.

For the movie equivalent check out Gerry. It does a masterful job of driving you to think about killing yourself, just like the main characters, to make it stop. Closure is a powerful force.

Lucas Darr said...

Outpost. (twitch)

(twitch)

Outpost.

Outpost. (giggle)

OUTPOST!

(twitch)

perlhaqr said...

Hunh!

I had actually heard of Desert Bus, but had no idea that Penn and Teller had been involved.

Anonymous said...

I actually enjoyed Emperor of the Fading Suns...

lucusloc said...

Outpost was such a huge disappointment. I still want it to be one of my favorite games, but it is just an unfinished pile of crap. Can no one finish that game?

Robert said...

I can't remember exactly (I've slept a few times since then), but there was something that you had to build away from your main set of buildings to get it to work (build another outpost maybe?) but no matter how far away I ran the tube, it would never work.

JFT said...

I could have sworn I finished Outpost once, but that was a looong time ago. At this point in life, I'm not sure I remember what I had for lunch today. Somewhere in the immense piles of loose games, there's an Outpost disk. If the Steam Summer Sale doesn't back me up further... No. That way lies madness. Outpost 2 was interesting, though, it was an RTS.

Stingray said...

Did anybody ever win the vacation? I never had enough givadamn to check in.

Brad K. said...

I kinda liked the first parts of Outpost 2. Might & Magic III was the last fun one of the series, and I have the notebooks of maps I made of MM I and MM II. I'm not sure why. Then MM IV, World of Xeen, ate the boot sectors on my Win XP system. Gack.

Sacred (Gold) is kinda fun, and Railroad Tychoon 3. And WebSudoku.com.